Everything You Know Is Wrong
Says Donald Trump
Donald Trump and Secretary of Junk Science Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. say that the reason for Americans’ poor health and lower life expectancy is exposure to ultraprocessed foods, environmental toxins, lack of physical activity and increased screen time, stress and excessive use of prescription drugs, including antidepressants.
They appeared at a White House briefing Thursday to announce a new report that, according to the Once Great1 Washington Post, “casts doubt on the current vaccine schedule and medications deemed safe by most in mainstream medicine.”
Some of the report’s suggestions also stretched the limits of science, medical experts said. Several sections of the report offer misleading representations of findings in scientific papers.
During the briefing, Kennedy claimed that “prescription drugs are now the number three cause of death in our country, after cardiac arrest and cancer.” However, the third-leading cause of death in the United States is accidents or unintentional injuries, which includes deaths due to drug overdoses, motor vehicle crashes and falls, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention mortality data for 2023.
Gun violence, the leading cause of death for children and teens in 2020 and 2021 according to the CDC, is not mentioned in the report.
Also at the briefing, Donald Trump fantasized that autism “has to be artificially induced,” saying,
“When you hear 10,000, it was 1 in 10,000, and now it’s 1 in 31 for autism, I think that’s just a terrible thing. It has to be something on the outside, has to be artificially induced, has to be.”
OK—you can cure COVID by “injecting” bleach inside the body, but autism comes from some sinister “outside” forces. Who needs science when you can make stuff up that changes the subject and helps you duck responsibility?
The day before, Trump aired another episode of his “So You Want To Be A World Leader?” show in which he challenges elected presidents to stop refuting his lies with truth. If you can stand it, watch the entire exchange. Do you think it’s worse than the “full Zelensky?”
When Trump showed South African President Cyril Ramaphosa a music video edited to support the Elon Musk view of a country that hates—and murders—white people, he pointed to images of rows of white crosses, and insisted they were a burial site for murdered white farmers.
But the New York Times reports,
The crosses were actually planted by activists staging a protest against farm murders.
By the end, with the stunned South African president looking on, Mr. Trump began flipping through a stack of papers, apparently showing white victims of violence in South Africa: “Death, death, death,” he said.
And the picture Trump held up of hazmat-suited workers lifting body bags did not, as Trump berated, show South African farmers being buried, but in fact was a screenshot of a Reuters video taken in the Democratic Republic of Congo after deadly battles with Rwanda-backed M23 rebels.
Don’t like the factual facts? Try some of our counterfactual facts—they’re more exciting!
If you want to further torture yourself by diving even deeper into Donald Trump’s twisted mind, Roll Call is printing video and verbatim transcripts of every Trump interview, press briefing, Oval Office gaggle, remarks and speech. Click on “press gaggle” or search for “Oval Office” to see more sentences you couldn’t possibly diagram or logic impossible to follow.
Ronald Reagan famously misquoted John Adams, saying “Facts are stupid things” when the word Adams used was “stubborn.” Donald Trump believes both assertions—facts are stupid things that can be ignored, and also stubborn things his enemies keep using against him.
What’s a democracy to do? I’ll say it again—we need to win back the House, and we’re inches away from doing it. When the House big, ugly tax and spending bill passed in the dead of night, Speaker-to-be Hakeem Jeffries said,
“This day may very well turn out to be the day that House Republicans lost control of the United States House of Representatives, because the American people are paying attention. They are smarter than you think, and they know when they are being hurt, they know when their interests are not being served, and they know when they have been lied to and deceived.”
Does being lied to and deceived matter to voters? Trump doesn’t think so. We’ll soon find out.
But still worth reading—and complaining about.